Transitions

There are parts of my life I don’t share on this blog, not only because I think they’d distract from my real purpose here, and dilute something I like to keep focused and pure; but also because it just strains my comfort zone to rant about life to strangers on the internet. Not that I don’t love you all, because I truly, truly do. I often allude to happenings in my life, make thinly veiled posts about struggles, emotions, growing up I suppose, but rarely ever talk about life itself, the meat of it. I still won’t, but this week was hard to focus on anything athletic, training was kind of a mess, as was I. I don’t like change, because it forces you to adapt, and adaptation takes a lot of energy, energy I could be spending training, loving, cooking, whatever. It just feels inefficient to me to regularly remove yourself from a good rhythm, for consistency is where I find I improve the most. That being said, this past week was filled with adaptations, I resigned from my job, filled the final bits of paperwork for graduate school, and made a mess of one of my most precious relationships. All this made training, and sleeping, and eating a sort of “back burner” affair. But because this is a Crossfit blog, I’ll write about training through periods like this, rather than my specific struggles.

I want to start with this post that Josh Bridges wrote about having bad days, and how to break the cycle. While this past week wasn’t specifically about training, it was still a bad week, and often it forces me to remind myself why I started this, what was fun about it, what I enjoyed. So I threw myself into those things, lifting heavy, human movement, mechanics, mobility, good food, and personal improvement. All easier said than done, but just trying gave me something else to focus on and some clarity. Now I can return, at least somewhat rejuvenated, ready to attack more weaknesses and have fun doing it.

I haven’t really updated people on my diet lately, so I wanted to publish a pretty typical training day for me these days, what it looks like both from a food perspective, as well as a macronutrient/calorie perspective.

So there you have it, a day in the life of me. Granted these numbers are mostly pretty accurate approximations, I do weigh my food, but a .5 here and a .2 there, I don’t really sort that out into individual calories. I have a goal of at least 3800 calories a day, at least 1g/lb protein (215g), and at least 300g carbs on training days. As long as I meet those goals, the rest is just wiggle room. I’m not a fitness competitor, I don’t need ab definition to perform at my best, so that level of detail really isn’t warranted.

Like I said, training this week was a mess. The parts I’ve chosen are really a reflection of the highlights, the parts I got in, didn’t fail miserably at, and felt okay about doing. There was a lot of skipped, or subbed, or whatever else work this week that just didn’t happen. That’s life, I’m not going to focus on it, other than to say it happened and I’m moving forwards.

Monday’s work was one of the most mentally challenging workouts of my life. It’s easy for me to hop on a rower and push myself to the limit, in a sick way it’s sort of fun for me to do that; 60 front squats at 205 ( not light) is a different level of push entirely. It’s a slow, grueling, fatiguing push that I really can’t even describe well. It wasn’t even so much that I was tired, or winded, I was just exhausted, there was a moment where for a second I swore I couldn’t even feel my body, and more than one rest between sets where I had to put my hand on a wall to balance myself. Needless to say, I was sore from this for the better part of the week, I think Friday morning I finally felt like moving correctly again. We’re still hammering strict HSPU work, which is great, I can definitely track my improvements there on a weekly basis, being comfortable inverted is also coming along. Hopefully this will all build to a HS walk soon that doesn’t resemble “organized falling” which is basically what I do now when I practice. Wednesday was the height of my pretty ridiculous week, but I couldn’t skip deadlift day, for I love them so much. Honestly the worst part about this was the hook grip, clean grip deadlifts are an entirely different stimuli than regular deadlifts, I think I spend about 60% of my effort just on holding onto the weight, and whatever is left goes into moving it correctly. My poor thumbs…

Friday, finally recovered from Monday, was another set of high volume squatting, really throwing as much at our legs right now as we can from an endurance perspective. Though I think it might be negatively affecting strength, time will tell. I trust Max, and have faith in the programming. Saturday was all gymnastics, not being a gymnasty person, I probably need 3 days like this a week, but I would go insane, it takes so much effort for me to take days like this as seriously as I take deadlift or squat days. I just feel so much more comfortable moving heavy barbells than I do moving my heavy ass on a set of rings. Essence of the athlete at work, adaptations ensue!

The other big change you’ll notice last week is that my AD work didn’t happen, not for lack of trying, but I’ve been having trouble getting it back into working order. As I posted last week I trashed my first belt in about a year, I ordered a new belt and paid to have it replaced professionally, and within the first session it was already skipping again. I don’t know if I got a bad belt, or if they’re really not made for this, or maybe if it was installed incorrectly. I can’t say for certain, but for the time being, I’m finally taking rest days as rest days. Maybe it will be a good thing for now. I already miss that work though. God I’m weird.

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About Me

I'm Dan - holy balls that's a scary looking mug! I'm a equal parts goofy and intense, it's a ying-yang thing. I do CrossFit 7 days a week, eat mostly paleo, love my workout jams and won't apologize for any of it. My goal is to give back to these communities as much if not more than I've taken from them. Come in and stay awhile - I'm happy to have you.